Retune Health’s approach to regulating your nervous system works because we stimulate and connect multiple areas of your body and mind at once in a playful and approachable way. We combine the powerful listening therapy of the Safe and Sound Protocol (SSP) with social connection, creative time, shared somatic practices and short neuroscience lessons.
As shown below, Retune Health positively impacts your body, your mind and the way you relate to others.
How Does Retune Health Impact the Body?
The SSP is doing two things at once: rehabilitating your Middle Ear Muscles (MEM) and stimulating your vagus nerve.
Middle Ear Muscles: Our MEM are the eardrums’s gatekeepers, determining which sound frequencies are allowed to enter. When these muscles have lost muscle tone, more low tone ‘threat’ frequencies enter and trigger our Fight/Flight response via the auditory nerve and auditory reflex. The SSP strengthens these tiny muscles, helping us re-prioritize the frequency of the human voice over the low frequencies of threat. By strengthening these muscles, we become more tolerant of external sound stimulation and are triggered less often.
Vagus Nerve Stimulation: The SSP also uses targeted sound frequencies to send cues of safety directly to your nervous system, building the foundation for awareness, embodiment and resilience.
Somatic Practices: Your Retune Health provider will begin each session with a different somatic practice, or felt-sense of safety. These moments are intended to allow you time to explore with what feels like joy and peace in your own body. They are simple practices that you can take with you long after the course is over, practicing them whenever you need to reset your focus, your emotions or your felt sense back to ease.
How Does Retune Health Help Calm the Mind?
Creative Time: The auditory nerve and vagus nerve meet up in our brainstem, the center of unconscious reflexive behavior. When we engage in gentle movement and creative projects (doodling or shaping clay), we are further stimulating that same pre-verbal, pre-cognitive part of the brainstem and wiring together the felt sense of safety and connection with pleasure, creativity and joy. Adding creative time to each Retune Health session helps us stay in a meditative state and keeps our ‘thinking brain’ (neocortex) out of the way.
Neuroscience lessons: Shared during the online sessions or in short video format, Retune Health’s quick lessons deliver insight into how stress enters the body and the impact of that stress if left unchecked.
How Can Working with Retune Health Help Me in my Relationships?
Social Connection: Subconsciously, your nervous system is always looking for cues of safety from other people through things like body language, facial expression or tone of voice. By completing the SSP in Retune Health’s safe and welcoming group format, we create visual cues of safety through shared smiles and warm engagement which subconsciously connects these positive feelings of social connection with joy.